Google AdWords Forum

Every few days, a thread is posted when a advertiser has his/her "Adwords" pushed up to "Premium Listings"

Now Every single time this has happened, advertisers have made positive comments about Premium Listings. outperforming Adwords by quite some distance.

What I can NOT understand is why more people do NOT use Premium Listings instead, I know there are a number of reasons, such as:

High Entry Cost NO inventory available CPM rates are very high (when doing CPC analysis)

but the most common one:

Lack of Contact from Google in this department! (GoogleGuy u reading closely).

Now from my personal experience, I have NO problems with ANY of the above, especially the NO contact bit.

If push came to shove, I would phone Head of UK sales on her home number at 3am to spend some money, and I am sure she would not complain, this is the attitude I see at Google UK...Customer Service...Customer Service...

So either there is a problem in the USA, or better contact channels are required by Google in relation to Premium Listings.

The reason I am making this posting is for fellow members to realise that Google Premium Listings is a very good marketing tool, "often" cheaper than Adwords as NO bidding wars are being played.

The highest creative achieved: 20.04 CTR The lowest creative achieved: 7.27 CTR (the above are based on creatives with at least 2,000 impressions), there are other niche keywords with a few hundrded impressions achieving up to 100% CTR. ======================================

* Google using space that is unfilled - making them more revenue as CTR is higher. In that way it could just as easily imply the failure of premium listings model in some way..

* Google trying to convert their adwords advertisers (who provide much less revenue per advertiser) on the advantages of have a premium spot, therby converting small advertisers to big ones (to some extent this thread itself could very well be a manifestation of that strategy)

Premium spots are only sensible, cost effective (and affordable) for certain types of advertisers, while Adwords are more cost effective and affordable for other types. I think a lot depends on industry, click volume required, and scale of the advertisers business. Thre are a lot of webmasters advertising in Adwords, who would otherwise never advertise on the net, as the entry cost is low. The ROI for Google to manage and recruit this large group vs advertiser expenditure must be much lower, but some will be converted..

I just clicked on a premium ads on my laptop. Couldn't tell the difference in colours ;) (I wonder how many people Jacob N. would find, who would accidently do the same in a Usability test. I guess some other search engine would have to give him the order for that.)

"Zero. Viagra would be filled." What about some other search terms(like dog food or beeds. How does google assign the number of search terms for a "Premium Listings"? Do you get to know how many and what words your ad will be shown under "before" you buy your ad? Is there a guild line for this?

Regarding minimum spends, the minimum for the Google UK office is £3k, but yes, for special cases we can accept lower spends - espceially if the campaign is simple to post/manage etc... ============================================================

at last an answer many have been waiting for!

GoogleGuy, can we put Kate through the initiation ceremony at WebmasterWorld, or do you have other plans.

And since Kate (morgana)is based in the UK, Google Girl would be better as we do NOT really use terms such as Gal.

They are quite uniform so you would pretty much divide everything by 4. If you are asking for the *very* first of adwords (which was couple of months ago), it is really hard to tell, because I was changing my ad copy almost every day. However, even with the worst ad/kwds (before starting to read these forums ;-) ) it was always a profitable campaign. My site still needs quite a bit of work to improve the conversion ratio I am getting from adwords (1% right now), but I am still at the loss as to why it plummeted so badly once I moved "up north" -- different kind of people clicking on premium vs. adwords?

I believe that most people visit an ecom site 4 or 5 times before buying. I'm not suggesting you are wrong about premium, you know your business better than anyone, just that I think you have to compare like with like. Until you run the premium for a similar length of time I don't think you will know if its for you or not. The question is how much are you prepared to spend to be sure?

interesting finding ... can you be more precise by how much your conversion rate dropped? Using the approx figures you gave, your sales per week seemed to treble while your CTR only doubled, so your conversion actually appears to increase!

Anyway, I guess one thing is to see if you can reduce that $0.25 CPC. 2 things:

1) Were you the #1 Adwords guy before? If you weren't, then the results you're seeing will partly reflect the move to #1, not only to premium.

2) But assuming you were already #1 on a particular keyword, there is one way to get premium without paying any more CPC. That's to use [] exact matches. The thing that can really drive up the CPC in unpredictable ways is other keywords mixed in.

Say you want to have a Adword ad on your favourite keyword "algebra", and you're already #1 (more accurately, you're position 1 on [algebra] alone, and e.g. position 1.3 on average for all searches containing "algebra"). Maybe you're bidding $.15 and paying an average of $.08 a click. You find by experimenting that you "go north" to a premium slot if you raise your bid to $.60. Now if you up your bid for "algebra" to $.60 you find your average CPC jumps to maybe $.25, like yours did. What's causing this is searchers who are typing in searches like "algebra software", "algebra calculator" or even "algebra sex toy";). With these searches you're competing against high-bidders who are bidding on the generic terms "calculator", "software" or "sex toy". It's when your ad gets clicked on amidst all these other searches that your CPC is much higher than it is on your usual searches like "algebra" or "algebra help" or "algebra homework".

What's the solution? Use exact matches like [algebra]. With an exact match, if you're in position #1 then you can raise your bid and not have to pay any more than usual; you're already on top and so paying only a cent more than they guy in position #2. But by raising your bid you get elevated to premium. the only think to watch out for is the competition in position #2 raising their bid!:o

To answer your question - I was not 1st on algebra kwd. My avg position was 2. My max was set at 0.15, but on average the cost was 0.08 So, yes - this is probably due to moving to 1st position. - previous #1 must have set their max to 0.23 and I had to beat that. As far as using [algebra], I don't think it would help, because I have weeded out unwanted "algebra xxx" combination via negative keywords. I am constantly checking my logs to see if there are any wierd keyword combinations that were used to reach me and I haven't seen any for a while.

NFFC suggested I wait for a while, but even if conversion rate increases some, high click cost still seems to make it less profitable then my original setup.

Also, I probably need to start focusing on improving my conversion rate in general - I think I should be able to do better than 0.8%.

I threw it in a spreadsheet, and looking at it I think your first conclusion is right: there's no way the higher CTR is worth it at treble the price.

With the current CTRs you'd need to treble the page's conversion rate to make the more money from the higher option than the lower.

Even if you prequalified your ads more, causing CTR to drop while raising conversion, it's still doubtful if it would work. If by prequalifying more you halved the CTR, you'd still need to more than double conversion rates to find the expensive way was more profitable per week.